Registering Your Liferay DXP Server with LCS

This document has been updated and ported to Liferay Learn and is no longer maintained here.

Liferay Connected Services has been deprecated as of July 1st, 2021. Customers should migrate off of LCS by December 1st, 2021. Please read the Changes to Liferay Product Activation announcement to learn more.

Follow these steps to register your Liferay DXP server with LCS:

1. Ensure that you’ve completed the LCS preconfiguration steps.

2. Log in to lcs.liferay.com. This takes you to your company’s LCS project. If your company has multiple projects, from the menu to the right of the Dashboard tab select the project that’s getting a new server.

   

   Figure 1: Select your LCS project from the menu highlighted by the red box in this screenshot.

3. Select or create the environment in which to register this server. If you’re using LCS for activation, upon connection to LCS your server consumes an activation key from the subscription type assigned to the environment. Note that a subscription type can only be assigned to an environment when creating the environment. If you have sufficient permissions in your company’s project, you can create a new environment by selecting Add Environment.

   

   Figure 2: You must register your server in an LCS environment. The red box in this screenshot highlights environments.

4. Select the environment’s Registration tab. This is where you manage and download the environment’s token file, that registers servers in the environment.

   In the Registration tab’s Services section, change the Liferay Instance Activation setting, if needed. Note that if you change this option and there are servers already registered in the environment, you must regenerate the token file and use it to reconnect those servers to LCS. You’ll regenerate and/or download the token in the next step.

   Additionally, If you disable this service, you must activate via an XML file from Liferay support, and such instances must run version 5.0.0 or newer of the LCS client app.

   Liferay Instance Activation is either enabled or disabled for all servers that connect to this environment. If Portal Property Analysis is selected, you can prevent LCS environment.

   

   Figure 3: An environment's Registration tab lets you manage the token file used to register your server in the environment.

5. What you do now depends on what you did in the previous step:

   Changes to Liferay Instance Activation: Regenerate and download the token. Regenerating a token causes all servers using the old token to disconnect from LCS. You must reconnect them using the new token.

   No changes to LCS service selections: Download the token.

6. Place the token file in your server’s [Liferay Home]/data folder. Note that Liferay Home is usually the parent folder of the application server’s folder. If your server is running, it should connect to LCS in about one minute. If your server isn’t running, it connects to LCS on startup.

7. Celebrate! Your Liferay DXP server is registered in LCS. If for some reason it isn’t, see the LCS troubleshooting article.

Note: You may be wondering what happens if LCS goes offline. Don’t worry, this doesn’t cause a rift in the space-time continuum. LCS is deployed on a global cloud infrastructure set up for automatic failure recovery. The potential for non-availability is very low. In the event of an outage, however, registered servers maintain a local copy of their uptime information to transmit to LCS when it comes back online. If you use LCS for activation, active subscriptions have a 30-day grace period to re-establish connectivity and remain valid. This is ample time for LCS to come back online.

Determining Your Server’s LCS Connection Status

In Liferay DXP, you can view your LCS connection status in the LCS client app. Access the client by clicking Control Panel → Configuration → Liferay Connected Services.

Here’s a full description of what a connected LCS client app displays:

Connection Uptime: The duration of the client’s connection with LCS.

Last Message Received: The time the LCS client received the latest connection message from LCS. These messages occur only upon connection/reconnection and are unrelated to server metrics. It’s therefore common for a long period of time to pass before the client receives another such message for a reconnection event.

Services: The LCS services enabled for this server. Note that all servers in an environment use the same set of LCS services. LCS services can’t be controlled on a server-by-server basis.

Note: Portal Analytics, Fix Pack Management and Portal Properties Analysis have been removed from the list of available services. For more information about this change, please read this article

Project Home: A link to this server’s LCS project.

Environment: A link to this server’s LCS environment.

Server Dashboard: A link to the server on LCS.

Figure 4: The server is connected to LCS.